The initial drum-roll literally frightened Madame Sousatzka out of her seat. She dropped her programme and stood trembling from head to foot as if she were wearing a corset of built-in semi-quavers.
Jenny, who had never been to the Festival Hall before, wanted to show her enthusiasm, and she opened her mouth to invoke the Lord to save the Sovereign. She had called upon the Almighty in her deep contralto, and was just about to tell Him what to do, when she realised that she was quite alone, and unwilling to take the whole of the responsibility on her shoulders – after all, she wasn’t even a relation – she decided to hold her peace.
Uncle cheated a little, humming the tune quietly to herself. During her marriage and the diplomatic rounds with Paul, she had heard it often enough. She raised her eyes slowly to the roof and whispered, ‘Paul, they’re playing our tune.’
Madame Sousatzka looked upon the Anthem as a respite, and hoped patriotically that it would go on for ever.
Cordle used the music to ask God to save himself. He felt guilty, as if he were using someone else’s telephone, and he looked around, wondering if he’d been found out. He caught Manders’s eye and knowing look. ‘They always do this,’ it seemed to say. ‘I have to go through it every concert. I’m an old-timer, you know. It’s only a formality.’
When the Anthem was over the tympano player patted his drum as if he was patting a horse after a good gallop. The audience sat down and rearranged their clothes and programmes. There was a rustle of paper as they confirmed for the hundredth time that they were to be treated to the Leonora Number Three. The unison opening put them at their ease and prophesied that there would be no difficulty in listening to the overture. It might even be a pleasure.
Jenny was clinging to her seat with fascination, not so much at the music as at the paraphernalia of the occasion. In particular that part of the audience that sat behind the stage, facing the conductor. A woman in a red pullover in the front row kept nodding her head at the conductor as if in approval, and an old bearded man next to her, sitting immediately behind the drums, stared blankly in front of him like a mute, as if the percussion of the National Anthem had paralysed him. She looked up at the organ, and the countless pipes that sprawled like a plumber’s paradise across the upper wall. She started to count them, but after the first dozen they blurred and became two-dimensional. She took another general look at the audience behind the stage. So many people, she thought. I must know some of them. She thought of all the people she had met during her working life. Hundreds of them. Freds and Bills and Toms, even a Eustace, she remembered. But to none of them, not even to Eustace, could she put a face. She remembered only beards or stubbles, horny hands and the occasional acne. Her acquired blindness was acutely compensated for in her sense of touch. She imagined herself groping around the audience with her fingers, greeting each familiar touch. But would they know her? She knew she could recall the faces of the teachers of her childhood, but would they recognize all their pupils? She suddenly grew afraid that in the vast hall a Tom, Bill or Fred was staring at her, and she covered her face with her programme. She was too innocent to know that her clients came to her equipped with the same blindness, born of the same necessity.
The sound of a distant trumpet-call from the orchestra cut off her wandering thoughts, and for the first time she began to listen. She found it hard to concentrate, and she tried reading her programme. ‘The music is suddenly interrupted by the sound of a distant trumpet-call.’ That must have been it, she thought, and found that the programme notes ended only a short paragraph later. One paragraph to Marcus. Suddenly the trumpet called again. It sounded nearer this time, but it was a harsh note, and off-key, and in no way corresponded to the ‘sound of heroic calm’ of the optimistic programme note. Two more lines to go. She read them hastily. ‘The end of the allegro symbolizes triumph and victory.’ She recognized the victory as the full orchestra took up the melody. She looked at the programme hopefully, but there was no doubt that the notes had come to an end. There was a two-inch white gap, and Marcus was over the page.
The audience began to applaud, a formal, polite acclaim, neatly timed for an overture, and when it began to wane Mrs Crominski, Jenny, Cordle, Uncle and Madame Sousatzka simultaneously began to clap again, encouraging the applause, no doubt in the hope that the orchestra would give an encore. But no one took up their clapping and the conductor was already leaving the platform. Jenny took out her pencil, and solemnly ticked off the overture on her programme. Then quietly, and with determination, she turned the page. She looked at Madame Sousatzka, who had folded her arms lightly on her lap. Her programme had dropped to the floor, and as the conductor disappeared from the platform she turned round and looked at the audience, preferring to read on their faces what was happening on the platform, rather than face it herself. Her eye caught a posse of fat starched ambulance women, seated near the exit, their faces a composite blank. They certainly weren’t there for the love of music. Stolid, immovable, there for their job and keeping the law, rather like long-suffering policemen in a controversial demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Their faces betrayed the void stare of duty, and Madame Sousatzka turned back helplessly to look at the platform. She stared at the green curtain solidly drawn, and she felt the fear that lay behind it.
Marcus stood there alone, with the green canvas wall in front of him. He felt the conductor’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Are we ready?’ he said. Marcus didn’t remember answering. He remembered being convinced that never in his life would he feel more alone. The usher drew the curtain, holding it aside for them to enter, and in that second when Marcus saw the vast audience as if through a wide-angle lens, and the foreground of flowers that half hid them, he knew that this moment was lonelier still. The conductor ushered him forward to the first step.
Mrs Crominski involuntarily relaxed, and trembled like a train. A woman sitting in front of her, who had been set in motion by Mrs Crominski’s trembling, turned round to look at her. ‘It’s my son,’ she said, by way of apology for the vibrations. She pointed to the small figure on the platform. ‘Is my son.’ The woman gave an understanding smile, as if she was prepared to be shaken like a cocktail throughout the concerto.
Madame Sousatzka leaned backwards in her seat, pressing herself into the upholstery, trying to embed her whole body into its resisting frame. ‘Don’t worry, my darrlink, this part is the worst. When you reach the piano it is over, and there is only the playing.’
Marcus climbed the first step. He heard the beginnings of the applause, unleashed by a single loud clap, which somehow or other he recognized as Cordle’s. Cordle had told him to look at the piano, and the ground between him and it would disappear. But he was afraid to look anywhere but at his feet, because he could not rely on them to take him where they all expected him to go. Then, suddenly, his fear made him impatient and he took the next steps two at a time, and found that he had reached the back desk of the first violins. The two players had turned round to watch him, their fiddles standing upside down on their knees like stunted ‘cellos. This was their moment. It was a moment that made up for years of back-desk frustration, for years of following the bowing of the men in front, and hoping to God they were doing likewise. For years of being automatically accused, for whenever a conductor detected a false note it was always towards their desk that he would turn a raised eyebrow.
They stared a Marcus, smiling, and he couldn’t help but see them. Then, like a disciplined miniature army, they raised their hands in which they held their bows, and cocked out their thumbs. Their movements were perfectly timed and symmetrical, for it was a regular routine with them. Every single soloist who played with their orchestra was greeted with their smiles and signs. Even the greatest, who needed no luck at all, even the idolized celebrities, who could have happily performed like pigs and got away with it, all were treated to the same send-off. Marcus smiled back at them, and his smile embedded itself into his face like a moist stucco. He moved forward and reached the fourth desk.
The two players sat immobile, their black backs stiff, their coat-tails drooped over their chairs, so that they looked like two transfixed swallows. Marcus looked at the jacket on the player on the inside, and saw a long fair hair clinging to it. He raised his hand automatically to take it off, and as he touched it, he felt that its removal would bring him bad luck. He wanted it to stay there as a talisman. It was only then that he noticed how his fingers were trembling. He swallowed, and it hurt him under his arms. His whole interior body felt like a nettle sting, as if his nerves were crying out to be scratched. He noticed as he moved forward that the foot of the inside player on the third desk was turned slightly outward, just enough to block his path. Marcus was convinced the man was trying to trip him up. He boiled himself up into the conviction that they were all against him, and when he reached the second desk and saw a mute on the violin stand, he was convinced that the orchestra were a bunch of saboteurs. He could remember no passage in the orchestral score of the concerto that called for a mute. They had had a secret meeting, he decided, they were going to give him as faint an accompaniment as possible. They didn’t think he was worthy. He shivered. ‘I’m not ready,’ he said to himself. ‘Where is the piano? Is the conductor still behind me? How long have I been walking? When can I start to get it all over with?’
By now, he’d reached the first desk. The sub-leader was sitting motionless, and by the shape of his back, Marcus knew that he knew the soloist was just behind him. He was sitting there, just like Jenny every Friday night, before Marcus surprised her with his hands over her eyes. And as he thought of Jenny, his body grew warmer and his fingers grew still. He put one hand on the piano stool and bowed to the applauding audience.
‘You feel better now,’ said Madame Sousatzka. ‘Just one bow, my darrlink, and sit down. You are ready. Sousatzka says you are ready.’
Marcus sat on the piano stool. He fiddled with the knobs on each side, from force of habit. The audience was silent. Marcus looked up at the conductor. He nodded, and Marcus felt for the G Major chord. He took a deep breath, as he knew Madame Sousatzka in the audience was doing, and as he breathed out the opening chord dropped from his fingers with surprised finality. In the short introduction that followed and the final run to its conclusion, he gradually detached himself from his playing. When the orchestra entered for the first time, there was a gradual stirring in the audience, as a relief from the tension Marcus had created.
Madame Sousatzka gently eased her pressure off the chair. Uncle put her hand on Sousatzka’s elbow. ‘All’s well,’ she whispered. She quickly looked at her programme as if at a time-table, checking that she had three movements on leave. She could safely board the train to Paris having seen that all was well at home. The faint background of the concerto was quickly attuned to the wheels of the train, the station calls, the hotel bells, and the Embassy waltzes.
Cordle put his hand across her, as if her seat were vacant. ‘He’s wonderful,’ he whispered to Sousatzka, and he leaned back, settling himself into a scrutiny of the various sections of the orchestra. It was the ‘cellos particularly that appealed to him. They, more than any other instrument, seemed to be an integral part of the player. The long black finger-board appeared to him as an extension of the player’s tongue. Hitherto, the tongue had played no part in Cordle’s osteopathic methods, and he resolved there and then to include it on his charts. He set about thinking what colour would be appropriate. Surreptitiously he felt for his notebook and a bunch of small coloured crayons he always carried with him. He spent the concerto experimenting with his colours.
Manders at the end of the row was planning Marcus’s future. He looked across at Cordle’s notebook and the coloured indefinable blots on the page. He’d never officially met Cordle, but as part of the Sousatzka retinue he accepted him readily as an eccentric. He looked over at Madame Sousatzka and saw her staring at the ceiling. He looked up to see what had drawn her attention, and a few heads behind him did likewise. But Manders found nothing, and he attributed the tilt of Sousatzka’s head to some profound meditation. And he was right.
Of all the people in the party, only Sousatzka was listening to the concerto. But not to Marcus. Once she had seen him off at the start, she was confident he would play brilliantly. As Marcus was playing, she was listening to her old Pachmann recording in her studio. She knew every nuance of that recording, and when Marcus’s interpretation did not coincide with it, it interrupted her enjoyment. In the middle of the first movement there was a slight crack in the record which had stretched itself across several revolutions. The rhythmic jump of the needle in the section had become part of the music for her, and she missed it in Marcus’s plastic hi-fi playing. Now the record was clean again, whizzing round in its 78 speed until the chord that introduced the cadenza. The agonizing silence that she had felt all the morning before the rehearsal was much shorter on the Pachmann recording, and he had started on his cadenza while there was still silence in the hall. The audience were shifting in speculation. The resigning chord was like the end of a pase doble when all the toreadors retire from the ring and leave the arena to the matador alone. When Marcus began, Pachmann was way ahead, and Madame Sousatzka had difficulty in concentrating on the recording. Marcus’s cadenza was a fading echo of Pachmann’s and gradually the echo was too distant to be heard. She could hear only the recording now, drumming her fingers on her black velvet knee, marvelling at his strange accentuation, joyfully anticipating the final triumphant trill. At the turn of the trill, the orchestra thundered in to clear away the spoils. The recording ended, and the needle slithered over the grooveless slate. Madame Sousatzka could not immediately reorientate herself to the Festival Hall, and she heard with horror that Marcus was still trilling. She started to count, quickly at first, to make up for the time she’d lost through her fear. But the orchestra had made their entry, and people around her were sighing with satisfaction, either with the playing or in anticipation of an interval. When it came, Sousatzka heard the scratching needle. She picked it up and turned the record over. The orchestra didn’t give her enough time. Marcus had started on the second movement before Pachmann could get going. She decided to take off the record and listen only to Marcus. She glanced at Jenny’s open programme. In the margin, Jenny had drawn three little boxes to represent the movements of the concerto, and Sousatzka noticed with a smile that the first little box had been shaded in.
The dark sad tones of the Andante took Uncle back to the moonlit rivers of Europe, where she and Paul had spent their happiness. The melody suggested to Cordle a deep purple, and softly he rubbed his crayon into a newly outlined tongue. Madame Sousatzka found the melody depressing. It seemed to prophesy her final loneliness. She knew that the vitality of the final movement would be strong enough to offset it, so she could afford for a while to indulge in the sadness that the music evoked. The piano and the orchestra were having a discussion, the piano anticipating arguments with youth and impulse, the orchestra gently remonstrating. At times the piano would offer a challenge, and the orchestra would take up the gauntlet with fear of their victory. And then they would turn to discussion again, gently pesuading each other, the orchestra resorting to pizzicato in its persuasion. But the piano always managed to get the upper hand, and in this unequal struggle, Madame Sousatzka saw herself opposed to Marcus. She knew that in the end she would lose him, if not to Manders then to someone else. She wondered how she could ever replace him. He had exhausted her like the leasehold of her house, which she couldn’t afford to renew. She felt she was dying, with Marcus strong and surviving at her bedside. In the short cadenza that interrupted her vision, his music was stormy and feverish, then suddenly calm. The orchestra, on its entry, had become tamed, and shifted, martyr-like, into a minor key. With that modulation, Madame Sousatzka felt she had yielded up her spirit and the piano phrase that cloaked the end of the movement fell over her like extreme unction.
There was no pause before the final movement, and Jenny had to read quickly through the prog
ramme notes. ‘Notice,’ they advised her, ‘the subtle canon between the clarinets and the piano.’ She wanted very much to oblige, but the word ‘canon’ bewildered her. She had known plenty of canons in her time, and none of them had been subtle, and she didn’t quite see what they would be doing here along with a clarinet, an instrument which, in any case, she couldn’t recognize. And quickly, before the Rondo began, she shaded in her second box.
The gaiety of the last movement infected the whole audience. Some were thinking of where they would dine after the concert, others of a visit to the artist’s room, of autographs, handshakes, and telling the tale in drawingrooms afterwards. Others wondered whether it was raining outside, and how difficult it would be to get a taxi.
The Sousatzka row seemed suddenly electrified. Manders was beaming. He knew from the feel of the audience that Marcus was a success. Even Uncle had returned from the embassies, and Cordle put away his tongues. Jenny was eagerly but sceptically awaiting the arrival of the canon.
Madame Sousatzka quickly resurrected herself, and felt the general enjoyment of the audience. Marcus was practically dancing in his seat, the elevated pedal springing from the soles of his shoes like a fixed punchball. Sousatzka looked at his body and the slight curve in his back that was accentuated while playing in the bass section of the piano. She realized that he had never played so well, except perhaps at the ‘salon’; that he would reasch a stage when he would depend entirely on having an audience. The thought didn’t disturb her too deeply because of the irresistibly happy nature of the music. ‘It plays well, my darrlink,’ she whispered.
Madame Sousatzka Page 15
